Near and far, big and small. As part of one of our lessons this week, we worked on a painting project and learnt about perspective at the same time. Our pre-schoolers used their paint tools to colour in a landscape and then made their selection of characters bigger or smaller, depending on where they were in the scene the children were creating. 

​This year alone has brought us a number of remarkable animated movies such as Inside out, Minions and Hotel Transylvania 2. During our computer lessons this term our grade 3’s to 5’s had a chance to create their very own stop motion animation! Because the theme of plants and their life cycle is one that the children are familiar with as part of the CAPS curriculum this term, we watched a time-lapse of a sunflower growing, before attempting our own animation of a plant. The children teamed up and modelled their flowers growth step by step, taking photos of each stage using their webcams. Once the modelling clay-plant had flowered and our photo sequence was complete, the children are using an animation program to put the pictures in order to create our short film and display to the class. We hope that this animation project inspires some of our youngsters to continue with animation projects; maybe we’ll see their names in the credits of a Disney movie one day!

This week our pre-schoolers had the opportunity to use the iPads in a new and exciting way. We discussed how to handle the iPads carefully and then took a little walk into the playground. Once we were outside, we spent some time looking at how to use the camera and then held a photo shoot for our friends and captured images of all the smiling faces. We then used these happy pictures create and build our very own puzzles!